Was able to take advantage of the nicer weather in Kansas City this weekend and got the decking installed. Not warm enough for the carpeting to adhere but still a big step!

Couple of comments/lessons learned for those that may read this in the future:

1. Take pictures (and measurements), take pictures (and measurements), take pictures (and measurements). If it weren't for the picture below I would have screwed up the decking and not left a 5-1/2" lip off the front of the boat.

When I started putting the wood on I couldn't get the sections to land on the stringers right. After I found the picture I realized that the boat had shifted forward on the trailer!?!?! That meant I had to drive it to the lake, put in water and push back ;-)....... Took an extra 30 minutes but it was worth it.

2. We used all but 4 (of the 100) countersunk screws so I think it would be good to plan those out vs. using at will. Still worked out well but could have stunk to run out!

3. Buy some marine sealant just in case. We had a piece of wood that was a little crooked on one end which created a 1/8" gap between two of the boards. Put some foam filler and sealant and worked just fine.

Quick question for the group. What type of speaker wire do most use? Marine or just regular 16/18 ga and minimize any connections in a wet/dry interface? I'm planning to run all wiring in 1/4" corrugated tubing. Thanks in advance!

Lot's to update as we've had some good weather as
of late. Let's start with the fencing panels. As mentioned before,
we used Mac's aluminum brightener to clean the fencing which worked
great. Our fencing was originally attached to the paneling by a metal lip
which is pretty common. That lip broke off in multiple places so we ended
up removing it. After doing so it actually provided a perfect
"indented" template to put the new paneling "inside."

We used blue colored rivets, and bought aluminum paneling from Pontoonfence (ordered 60’ roll, had 5-7 ft left over)

Our technique to cut was as
follows:

Used a new blade for each
cut, used bottom of fencing as a guide

Ran through cut at least 3-4
times until we started seeing some aluminum shavings come up

To make the break, we grabbed
a 2x4, put on “good side” then bent the bad side towards it.After bending back to flat in most cases it
would break then

We put rivets approximately
every 4-6” which seemed to work from a rigidity perspective.

The carpet was pretty easy to
install.Was able to use a friend’s heated
garage and let sit for 24 hours at 65 degrees.I did like most have mentioned, roll out completely, fold lengthwise and
apply adhesive one half at a time with a paint roller.After a few minutes you get the hang of it as
the adhesive is pretty thin, so you just need to work it around in a way that
spreads evenly and with enough thickness.We didn’t have the issue that others have discussed with it drying
quickly but that might have been due to the temperature in the room. Once down we used a carpet roller (100 lb) to remove wrinkles and bubbles.

Any tips on wiring your head unit? Did you hook up to one of the accessory switches to turn on and off or an ignition switch? As far as power goes I have the power cable that came with the PS wiring harness but not sure if it's large enough to power all or not... Only powering an amp, head unit & lighting but I think the amp might require 4 ga. Also just bought a distribution block to help but still curious on the ignition, etc.

Any tips on wiring your head unit? Did you hook up to one of the accessory switches to turn on and off or an ignition switch? As far as power goes I have the power cable that came with the PS wiring harness but not sure if it's large enough to power all or not... Only powering an amp, head unit & lighting but I think the amp might require 4 ga. Also just bought a distribution block to help but still curious on the ignition, etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!!

Scott

I tapped mine into main always hot wire on the harness. I don't have an amp. I use a separate battery for all my accessories (PS Harness).

Thanks Craig as always. I'm in an odd situation in that our lake only allows electric outboards. Just bought a Torqueedo 4.0 Cruise which will require 4 12V deep cycles.....

That said, after some research, I think I'm going to add another deep cycle for accessories, bring a 4ga power from it to a distribution box in the console (my amp requires 4 ga), then go from there to the accessories panel and head unit.

Question: Is it crazy to not have an ignition (assuming the electric motor has it's own switch) but add a master switch just upstream of the distribution box as a kill switch?

I’ll try to focus this post on our electrical systems as it
was one of my biggest fears! Let me
begin by stating that our situation is a little different in that our lake
restricts to electric motors only. So we
don’t have a conventional ignition switch wiring diagram like most. For us we basically have two electrical
systems: One for the electric outboard
motor (four 12V deep cycle batteries) and one for the accessories (one 12V deep
cycle battery for lights, stereo, horn, etc.).
We also connect our forward trolling motor to the accessories system.

Wiring: I
purchased the PS wiring kit and pre-wired gauges/electrical panel which I
HIGHLY recommend. Extremely easy to
install and saves so much time not having the make all of the daisy chain
connections yourself. To shield from
nicks and other damage under the boat we purchased plastic “conduit” from a
local Oriely’s auto parts. We purchased
an amplifier to add a little juice to our speakers which meant we had to run
larger power cabling (4ga) than included in our kit to power the accessories
system. Bought our 4ga wire from
bestboatwire.com which as mentioned by others is the cheapest place around for
bulk marine wire. For an in-line fuse we
found a really handy terminal block fuse (from same website). We still used a lot of the 12ga power and
ground wire supplied in the kit downstream of our distribution block described
in more detail below. All wire purchased
(power, speaker, etc) was tinned to prevent from corrosion. We also used GB Ox guard before making every
connection and heat shrink wire connectors wherever possible.

Motor Electrical System:
The electric outboard motor and batteries are one self-contained
system in that the batteries are connected in series that run to the motor
only. There is a throttle control cable
that spans from the motor to the throttle mounted on the dash. It has a power button to turn the motor on
and off. The toughest part of this process
was running the wiring in series from the motor to batteries to
kill-switch. Won’t waste everyone’s time
as it’s probably not very common to use an electric motor but let me know if you
have any questions when reading this in the future.

Accessories Electrical System: One challenge (as noted above in this post)
is that the “accessories system” needed a way to be turned on and off and also
have adequate protection. To accomplish
this we added two components. The first
is an on/off kill switch from Blue Seas Marine (red in picture) which isolates
the system and thus acts as an ignition switch for the accessories system. The second is a distribution block, which was
also purchased from Blue Seas Marine which accepts power from the 12V battery
downstream of our on/off switch and then distributes to the individual
accessory components (gauges, rocker switches, radio and amplifier). Each have their own independent fuse and we
added a fuse to the battery connector.
Doesn’t look extremely pretty in this picture but everything is secure
and as neat as we could get!

All of our batteries were Interstate deep cycle marine
batteries and our battery chargers were ProMarine 20 amp 3 bank chargers. We connected both chargers to a power strip
which feeds into a nifty waterproof Minnkota power port to connect to dock
power (shown in white below). Below the
port is our kill switch (also Blue Seas) for the electric motor.

Lastly, we were able to install our new PS bimini top which
was actually really simple!! Have been
really impressed with the quality of everything from pontoon stuff.

Planning to put in the water this weekend and
already have the bottle of wine and playlist picked out. Fingers crossed!

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